


Play It Right

by queercarmillasecretsanta



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Fluff, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-02 19:18:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2823122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queercarmillasecretsanta/pseuds/queercarmillasecretsanta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twelve days of Christmas, twelve days of holiday clichés, twelve days of fun and holiday cheer in the Hollis household! Carmilla meets the ominous and as-of-late Bruce Hollis for the first time, among others. Caroling, baking, presents, parties, beverages, and other holiday staples abound. This is literally just soppy, sweet, beautiful fluff, with some Bedroom Shenanigans thrown in for kicks. </p>
<p>Chapters will be posted once daily between December 21st and January 1st. My secret santa gift for queercarmillasecretsanta on tumblr!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Meeting

**Author's Note:**

> This has been my month-long project, and I'm super happy with how it's turned out. I hope to high heaven that my secret santa likes it!

“Carm, we’re leaving in _fifteen minutes_ , if you don’t start packing, I’m going to do it for you and it’s going to be nothing but lingerie and every pair of thigh highs you own.” 

Laura’s flapping about in the way that she tends to when there are lots of logistics to sort out, whirling around the room like a dervish regardless of the fact that her own bag is settled and packed on her neatly made bed, toiletries and all. Carmilla’s side of the room, however, is hardly more than a disaster scene, dresses and tights strewn all around the duvet (including, Laura notices, the dress that she’d been wearing the night before. Well, at least right up until she’d walked in the door of room 307). They have a taxi to the airport meeting them outside the dorm building in... _fourteen_ minutes now, Laura realizes with a harried exhale as she glances at the clock on her laptop, which is open and playing an absolutely ancient album of classical that Carmilla had dredged up from Spotify. 

“I mean. If that’s what you want to see me in,” the vampire says, in her usual teasing, sultry drawl. “Not like I’m complaining. Frostbite doesn’t affect the undead.” At a look from Laura, though, she softens and changes tack. “Fine, cutie, fine.” And she starts sorting, moving altogether too fast for Laura’s eyes to really follow without crossing.

Four minutes later, Carmilla has a haphazard bag perched on her duvet, and Laura goes to gather her shampoo and makeup for her, brushing it all into a plastic bag and handing it over for the vampire to cram on top of the muss of clothes. She sits on the top of her suitcase to keep it closed, and Laura, ever a considerate girlfriend, zips it for her, only to be lured into a kiss by gentle, long-fingered hands that play, one at the base of her skull and the other at the small of her back. 

Altogether, dating a vampire is, in Laura’s humble opinion, pretty fantastic. There is the minor drawback of not being able to see her for a lot of the day because sunlight makes her kind of queasy, though she often quells it for the sake of buying her girlfriend lunch or walking her to class or something equally ridiculous and romantic. Carmilla, Laura had been minorly surprised to find out, is so romantic it’s almost hilarious sometimes; she notices everything. When Laura happened to comment that she was drinking the last of the grape soda, there was another six-pack neatly stowed in the fridge by morning. When Laura offhandedly mentioned that she wished she had a silver chain instead of gold for one particular necklace, so that her earrings matched, Carmilla presented her with a gold chain probably more expensive than anything Laura’s held in her life, which apparently she had been “keeping around for a rainy day.” They sleep in the same bed, both of them the kind of clingy that means octopus cuddles are their modus operandi pretty much nightly. 

And of course there is the fact that Carmilla is kind of mind-melting in bed, but Laura tries not to think about that when they’re about to go get on an airplane home to see her father. 

“We have to go,” Laura laughs into the dark-haired girl’s lips, causing her gently searching tongue to slip onto the corner of her mouth and then move away altogether as Carmilla makes a little noise of discontent. 

“Fine, if we must,” she says, and steals one more quick peck before sliding off her suitcase and picking it up, swinging it around as easily as if it was a feather. Laura pauses the music, closes her laptop and packs it in her carry-on bag slung over her shoulder. All things packed and all parties ready to depart, they turn off the lights, lock the door to room 307, and head downstairs together. 

Carmilla, at first, had not been so enthusiastic about coming home with Laura for winter break. Laura, at first, had been hurt, thinking that it was rooted in her not wanting to spend time with her (she is, indeed, apt to downplay everything that comes her way, such as confessions of adoration and Very Clearly Romantic waltzing and Literal Kissing). 

“I mean, I know my life at home is more boring than the traveling that you could be doing or whatever, I just thought it might be nice to spend the holidays together,” she had said, fiddling with the end of her braid, sitting on her bed and watching Carmilla struggling to pronounce words in Marti Ke, her language-to-learn of the year. 

The vampire sighed and looked over at her, exasperation in her eyes that somehow still had a note of affection. She switched back to English to respond. “Look, okay, it’s not that I don’t want to spend time with you. It’s definitely not that.” 

“So what is it, then?” 

Carmilla’s face took on an embarrassed expression that almost never crosses it. And her voice got the kind of dignified that she only uses when she’s saying something that she knows Laura’s going to laugh at. “If you must know,” she had said delicately, enunciating every syllable, “I am something around apprehensive, trepidatious, anxious, et cetera, about the prospect of meeting your father. Me, the terrifying undead creature, meeting the man who mails you bear spray weekly.” 

And Laura had laughed. Mostly in relief. “Please, he just likes to be sure I’m empowered to protect myself. And sometimes that takes the form of colour-coded bear spray. It’s different, I’m not dating a bear. He’ll love you, seriously.” 

It had taken some coaxing. But once the true reason for Carmilla’s hesitation had come out and Laura committed herself to crushing it to pieces, how could the vampire say no? Especially with those damnably professional puppy eyes. 

The taxi driver is idling outside when they walk out, Laura all bundled up in a winter coat and scarf (though that’s more to hide the bite marks than because she’s actually cold), Carmilla looking too relaxed to be wearing one of her short dresses, this one charcoal-coloured and paired with burgundy knee socks, in this weather. He takes their suitcases (buckling a little under the weight of Carmilla’s, which is only amusing because she’d been carrying it with just her pinky finger through the top strap) and hauls them into the trunk, and then they’re off, headed off Silas’s campus to the airport, Laura leaning her head against Carmilla’s shoulder, their hands casually entwined on the seat between them. 

Once they’re at the airport, it’s a blur of the usual tedious routines, getting boarding passes from the check-in desks, showing their student identification at security and running carry-on bags through the scanners. But once they’re at the gate, settled down in seats bolted to the floor waiting for their call to board, Laura discovers something very interesting about her girlfriend. 

She has never been on an airplane. 

“Look, I just never had the opportunity, okay? When I wanted to get across oceans, I just sort of...hitched rides on ships and such.” She’s practically glued to the floor-to-ceiling glass window, watching planes take off and land on the tarmac with an expression of interest on her aquiline, pretty face. “God, how do they even stay up?!” 

Laura is not about to try to explain airplane physics to a centuries-old vampire who spends all her time reading philosophy and psychology texts. She’s not even sure she knows enough airplane physics to even begin to explain it. So she just says “magic” and leaves Carmilla to it, walking away from the gate to go and get two cups of hot chocolate from the café inside the airport. 

By the time she gets back, it appears that the novelty of Carmilla watching airplanes has waned for the time being. Instead, she’s buried her nose in a thick novel, paperback, unstable binding with how large it is. She looks up when Laura approaches, flicks up the armrest between the chair she’s sitting on and the one next to it. “Aren’t you an angel sent from Heaven,” she purrs, reaching out to take one of the paper cups from Laura’s hand and sipping at it gratefully. Laura, for her part, retains her own cup and sits in the proffered chair, the vampire’s arm settling around her casually. They have a very physical relationship, which Laura loves and LaFontaine likes to tease them about. Always, if they’re together, they have some sort of contact, shoulders touching, hands joined, knees brushing, etc. 

By the time they open the doors and start calling zones to board, hot chocolate has been more or less consumed, and Carmilla is swearing at an unsolved sudoku puzzle on her phone, and Laura is laughing affectionately at her frustration. “Put a six here,” Laura says, and reaches over and does it herself. 

“What? Laura, n-- _oh_. Oh God. Now I get it.” And then she’s furiously punching in numbers. Ten seconds later, the puzzle is solved, all boxes and columns filled in perfectly. “Definitely an angel,” she purrs, and kisses Laura’s temple before putting her phone in the pocket of her dress and standing up, slinging her bag over her shoulder. “They called us, I think.” 

And so they did. They board the plane, sitting close to the back. Technically, Laura has the window seat as assigned on her boarding pass, but she cedes it to Carmilla. 

It’s not a particularly long flight. The highlight by far is take-off, where Carmilla is looking out the window murmurings “what the hell, what the hell, what the _actual hell,_ ” while squeezing Laura’s hand in a viselike grip. For her part, Laura just laughs, settling down with her own novel on the tray table and trying to read the best she can while Carmilla’s alternately narrating the flight and resting her head on Laura’s shoulder. Eventually, however, they touch down, and Laura turns her phone back on to a text from her father saying that he’s waiting by the bag claim. Carmilla, reading over her shoulder, makes a little noise. 

“Oh, quit,” Laura chastises her. “Like I said. He’ll love you. I mean...we’re still gonna introduce you as Carmilla my girlfriend first before we drop the Carmilla my _vampire_ girlfriend bomb but he’ll love you then too. I just figure we should give him some time to adjust to that one.” 

“We could just never tell him, that sounds like a great idea,” responds the vampire. “One I could definitely get behind. Now move, cupcake, there’s finally space to get off this weird thing.” 

Carry-ons over shoulders, they exit the plane single-file, but as soon as they’re in the actual airport headed for the baggage claim, Laura reaches over to take Carmilla’s hand. Unusually, the vampire pulls away. “Maybe we shouldn’t...” 

If there were a prize for champion eye rolls, this one would take home all the money. While Carmilla’s apprehension to meet her father and her want to impress him is incredibly endearing, there are priorities here. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Laura tells her, and after a second their fingers twine together like usual. 

They stay like that all the way up to the second Laura sees her father, whereupon she drops her girlfriend’s hand to run and throw her arms around him. “Dad!” bursts out of her on impact, and Carmilla smiles because her voice is doing that endearing squeaky thing that happens when she’s so excited she can’t contain it. 

The smile almost falls a second later, when Laura’s father is done kissing the top of his daughter’s head and instead is looking over her hair to where Carmilla is standing, bag in hand, shifting a little from the balls of her feet to her heels. 

“You must be Carmilla!” he says, and Laura disengages, her smile like the sun coming out.

“Yep, this is Carmilla. And this is my dad!” She gestures from father the vampire and back again, her eyes alight, her fingers fluttering. 

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Hollis,” Carmilla says, the gentlewoman’s training she doesn’t often use creeping back into her voice as she extends a hand, letting her handshake be firm but not firmer than Laura’s father’s. They look alike, especially around the eyes and nose, but his hair is a soft grey, crow’s feet around his eyes. He’s not old, per se, but he isn’t young either. Regardless, Carmilla can tell he’s strong, tall and well-built, with sharp, intelligent brown eyes. 

“Please, call me Bruce,” he responds. “We’re definitely not the formal type around the Hollis household. ‘Mr. Hollis’ makes me feel like an old geezer.” 

“...Okay, um, Bruce,” Carmilla tries. Laura smiles encouragingly at her, and then steps up and takes her hand again, kissing her on the protuberant cheekbone. The vampire, for her part, is put slightly at ease by her casual display of affection, or at least it makes her okay with doing what they usually do in public. She draws her against her side a little, as Bruce is investigating the conveyor belt for Laura’s suitcase, which he pulls off as soon as he sees. Carmilla gets her own, trying to act like it’s an effort in case he picks it up and realizes that a suitcase with that many books shouldn’t be so easily lifted. 

They walk out of the airport in a line, Laura in the middle with Carmilla on her left and her father on her right, glowing in the way that tells Carmilla there’s pure, refined happiness roiling through her. She’s chattering the whole way, “And how is aunt Reneé? I know that she was trying to get a promotion the last time I talked to her, did you find out anything like that? You haven’t decorated the house yet, right?” 

Carmilla feels intrusive trying to put anything into the conversation, which seems like a relatively personal one. So she just walks with them silently, a soft smile curving up on her mouth to see Laura’s happiness and her father’s obvious love for her. 

But when they get to the Hollis car, Bruce surprises her. He puts their suitcases in the back, then turns and folds Laura into a hug with one solid arm. “Glad you’re home, kid,” he says, and then he reaches out and snags a surprised Carmilla with his other arm, hugging her too. “You too, kid’s girlfriend.” 

Apprehensive as she is about the conversations to follow regardless, Carmilla feels warmth. Parental affection. _That’s_ a new one for her.


	2. Mall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which shopping malls are a thing that can be and are visited.

The house is exactly as Carmilla expected it to be. 

She knows that Laura and her father have been on their own for a while, and that her father has tried to play all the roles at once for her. She knows that they’re incredibly close; when she was still living full-time around here, they used to go to the shooting range together on weekends. Laura says that they cooked and ate dinner together at least four times a week. Her father was overprotective, certainly, but Laura did not have a bad life under his roof at all. 

And what a nice roof it is. The drive from the airport to the Hollis driveway is a little less than fifteen minutes, with Laura in the front seat and Carmilla in the back. Bruce is driving, one hand on the wheel and the other hanging out the window, which he keeps open as they whip down the highway. He asks questions, mostly to Laura, a few directed at Carmilla, who is glad for the prompts because she has no idea how to initiate conversation with someone that she desperately wants to impress. Laura, for her part, is just happy to be with her father again. 

They pull up to the house and haul suitcases out of the car and in through the front door. 

“Okay,” says Bruce. “I’ll take these upstairs to Laura’s room and the guest room.” 

Carmilla arches an eyebrow at Laura behind her father’s back. It hasn’t occurred to her that they might be forced to sleep in separate rooms. Even when they weren’t together, they were at least sleeping in the same room. Of course now it’s the same _bed_ , and that’s been normalized into her behavior such that she’s not sure how she’ll even get by without the impressive feat of octopus cuddling that the two of them engage in nightly. 

_Just go with it_ , Laura mouths back to her. “I’ll give Carm the grand tour,” she says to her father, as he’s heaving Carmilla’s suitcase up the first couple of stairs. 

“I guess you spend some time in the gym, Carmilla,” he says, huffing out a laugh as he hauls it up another step. 

“I like to stay fit,” says the vampire, a little lamely, not _overly_ good at coming up with basic excuses for her supernatural powers on the spot. “And I guess I did put one too many books in there.” 

“I’ll say,” exhales Bruce, who by this time is halfway up the stairs, a few beads of sweat on his forehead even though his arms are clearly relatively muscular. 

“Come on,” Laura puts in, tugging on Carmilla’s arm, and the vampire goes with her girlfriend, further down the hall and into a spacious kitchen/dining area, well-lit with tall windows adorned with mismatched curtains. “Okay. Soooo, here’s the kitchen, obviously, and the living room and the dining room table that we only use when we have company over, so we probably will tonight. And the living room, and the TV Dad watches too many sports on and I watch too much of the queer section on Netflix on.”

Carmilla looks around, genuinely interested. The place is clean, well-kept, the carpet vacuumed, the table and counters clear. There is a bowl in the sink with the remnants of soggy cereal, soaked through with milk, but other than that dishes are all in their glass-fronted cabinets. There’s a patio and a little backyard, she can see, though right now it’s looking pretty depressing with all the trees bare and the sky a grey, steely overcast. There are a lot of photographs hung up on the walls, mostly of Laura of varying ages. She studies one of a chubby-cheeked toddler in a faded pink dress and flyaway, wispy hair, holding a beach ball and wearing a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. 

“Oh, gosh, my baby pictures,” Laura says, bashful, but Carmilla is tracing the glass with gentle fingers, a soft smile curling up on her lips. So sweet. So human, and so very sweet. 

“You were adorable. I can’t imagine what happened,” she teases the girl, who clicks her tongue and pushes her lightly, a playful hand on her upper arm. 

“Whatever,” she says, and then takes Carmilla’s hand in her own, showing her the downstairs bathroom briefly before she drags her upstairs. Bruce is nowhere to be found. “He’s probably in his office,” explains Laura, gesturing at a closed door at the end of the hall. “He gets a lot of conference calls and stuff, so he has to take them at least to tell them to call him back at a better time. Anyway! Here’s my room.” 

Laura’s room isn’t decorated that much differently from what she has in their room at school, except for the posters on the walls--a couple of Veronica Mars, one of Doctor Who, one of Harry Potter, and one with a rendering of William Shakespeare with “Will Power” under it in stark red text. Her duvet is neat, her bed small, and her desk bare (all her school supplies, more or less, having come with her to Silas). Carmilla wanders around it, touching little knick-knacks, thinking about Laura living in this room, coming home to it every night. 

“Was hoping I would get to sleep in here with you,” she says, looking over her shoulder while she’s playing with a little faux-jade dragon sitting on a bookshelf. 

Laura coaxes it out of her hands, but replaces it quite satisfactorily, her own fingers lacing with Carmilla’s “No one ever said we can’t be sneaky,” she suggests, and leans forward to kiss her, softly pressing her lips to the corner of Carmilla’s mouth just as there’s a knock on the doorframe. She springs backwards. 

Bruce is walking in, his hands up. “Don’t let me harsh your mellow,” he says, which, God, that’s exactly the sort of lame expression that Laura uses on the daily. Carmilla can see where she gets it from now. “I just wanted to let you know that conference calls are terrible, and we’ll make dinner but are you okay with me taking a couple of hours to sort all this out? I swear, hon, after that I’m yours.” 

Laura shrugs, not offended. He works a lot, but it’s never diminished the amount of time that he allots to spend with her. “Sure. Can I have the car? Carm and I will go somewhere.” 

“Will we, now?” Carmilla’s about to say, but she doesn’t because Bruce is stepping forward and pulling out his wallet, pulling out a few bills and passing them over to his daughter. 

“Go Christmas shopping, if you haven’t yet,” he tells her. “I have your little gifts, and I got something for Carmilla too even though I don’t really know what she likes yet, but I’m sure up there at Silas there’s not many shopping expeditions to be had.” 

Carmilla shoots startled eyes at Laura. A gift? From Laura’s father? Is it a gun, with an attached note _“this is what I’ll use to shoot you if you break my daughter’s heart?”_ And yet...the fact that he’d thought of her at all enough to attempt a gift is somehow...warming. Laura, for her part, isn’t surprised. It will, she hopes, become clear to Carmilla in the next couple of days that for all his intimidating impression, he’s got a heart of gold and absolutely loves Christmas, giving back all he can to everyone he can. 

Right now, though, they’re going to the mall. 

Bruce goes back into the office and Carmilla kisses Laura one more time for good measure before they head downstairs together and Laura takes the car keys from the counter, slips her coat on again. Carmilla finds out that she likes being in the passenger seat while Laura drives; it gives her an excuse to look over and watch her. She drives with both hands on the wheel, her focus straight ahead, and she plugs her iPod into the aux cord and continues the ongoing attempt to educate Carmilla about modern music. 

Carmilla, in the fifteen-minute car ride, decides that she very much likes The Decemberists and Neutral Milk Hotel, and can definitely do without Joanna Newsom and Brad Paisley. Laura, in the fifteen-minute car ride, is alternately delighted that Carmilla has the good sense to like two of her favorite bands, and upset that Carmilla has the nerve to call two of her favorite singers “screechy” and “too twangy” respectively. Carmilla mentions briefly that she hasn’t been to a mall in upwards of thirty years. Laura finds this scandalous. (“I mean, they suck and they’re really busy and everything, but there’s something kind of fun about them, you know?”)

The drive ends, but the conversation doesn’t, and they continue it as they walk into the only mall in Laura’s town--it’s small, nothing particularly impressive, but it does have quite a few department stores and all the necessary mall hotspots; a place that sells weirdly flavored ice cream, an electronics store, a goth store populated mostly by preteens, one of those bungee jumping trampolines in the middle of the food court. Everything is all decked out for Christmas, and Laura seems to know where she’s going. Carmilla follows her lead, their hands interlaced, firmly together. 

“Okay, so,” Laura says, as they’re wandering into the clearance section of a department store, with obnoxious SALE signs everywhere and employees wearing Santa hats and looking like they’d rather be anywhere but here. “I have a gift for you already, but I haven’t got one for Dad, so I have to visit the men’s section briefly. I was going to get him a couple of nice sweaters. He’s always looking for nice clothes, but he doesn’t really know how to pick them out so I usually go with him. Kind of hard for me to do that when I’m at school, though.” 

“That’s very sweet of you,” Carmilla tells her, and they set to wandering. Laura finds a trenchcoat and puts it on, and _of course_ proceeds to pretend to be a daring detective on the hunt for a missing husband for a solid five minutes, while all the while Carmilla watches and wonders how she can possibly love this ridiculous nerd as much as she does.

Carmilla’s no better, though. She finds a few dresses that she decides that she can’t live without and buys them at the nearest kiosk without even trying them on. (Sewing happens to be one of her many skills, this one actually taught to her when she had still been a human, which means it’s actually one of the things she’s best at, what with centuries to practice and all.) When she does try something on, it’s when they’ve ventured into the men’s section and Laura is looking at sweaters and Carmilla is bored, so takes down a three-piece suit and a crisp, high-collared shirt from the shelves, disappearing momentarily into a dressing room and returning looking like she’s stepped out of some black-and-white fashion company ad. 

Laura blinks a little too fast when she sees her. “Wow,” she says, and thinks privately that she might just have to invest in buying Carmilla a nice suit if this is what the sight of it’s going to do to her. “You look...” 

“Incredible, wonderful, sexy, fuckable, all of the above?” the vampire teases, blowing her a kiss and turning on the spot, preening just a bit. Okay, so she’s vain. Vampires tend to be. She feels no shame in it. 

“All of the above,” Laura agrees, and with a laugh Carmilla takes her waist and waltzes her around the plush scarlet carpet, in front of the three-faceted mirror, with one sales associate standing nearby with a distasteful expression on her face and another standing a bit further that’s grinning indulgently, admiring the display. 

It is with great remorse that Laura watches Carmilla hang the suit back up on the rack when she’s back in her dress, _not_ that her dress isn’t equally attractive. Regardless, she finds a couple of sweaters for her dad and she buys them, both of them carrying bags as they head out to the mall again, done with their obligations, now just having fun. 

Of course Carmilla makes them go in the goth store, because they have thigh-high stockings, which she is in constant need of because she’s not overly responsible with them. While she’s selecting a few pairs, Laura’s sifting through a bin of buttons, finding one with a pair of vampire fangs poking out of a red-lipsticked mouth, script across the bottom reading _Bite Me_. She finds it so funny that she buys it, to put on her messenger bag at school with all the other buttons she’s collected over the year. 

“Maybe later,” is what Carmilla says with a wink when Laura shows it to her, letting her left fang out from behind her ostensibly human canine for just a second before retracting it. 

They don’t make any more purchases. Carmilla keeps an eye out for something that she can get for Laura for Christmas, but of course there’s nothing suitable for her. She’ll have to take matters into her own hands and go out looking in more implausible places for something to get Laura--something that’s not too out of the realm of possibility since she will most likely be opening it in front of her father, but also something special. She’s turning that over and over in her mind as they hop from store to store. 

When they’re done with that, Carmilla spots a stand that sells cinnamon-sugar pretzels, and she offers to buy Laura one before Laura even indicates that she wants one, though she does. (Actual best girlfriend ever, Laura’s thinking while Carmilla’s forking over nearly five dollars for a pretzel the size of both of their heads put together.) They sit together on a couch and watch children flock to the Meet Father Christmas display, sitting on his knee and telling him what they want for the holiday season. 

“I love you,” Carmilla says, while Laura’s sucking cinnamon sugar from her index finger and thumb. 

“I love you,” Laura responds, while Carmilla’s trying to stuff entirely too much fried dough between her pretty lips. Then they’re both laughing, and laughing, and kissing, and laughing some more.

Carmilla thinks that this whole holiday season thing isn’t shaping up to be so bad.


	3. Meeting Pt. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carmilla meets Laura's hometown friends.

Carmilla is not enthusiastic about this whole _sleeping apart_ thing. She’s carefully cultivated her sleeping schedule to seem like a normal human’s for the past couple of weeks, but that first night without Laura in her arms ruins it all, and she sits up at the window-seat in the guest room looking at the stars for hours and hours. Bruce is up late for some reason or another, and by the time he finally goes to bed and Carmilla texts Laura to ask if she wants some company, the girl is already asleep and doesn’t answer. 

It’s not awful. She gets a few minutes. And besides, she doesn’t technically need to sleep to survive, it just makes her feel better, gives her more energy. 

The morning is strange. She’s up early, since she didn’t actually sleep, and when she heads downstairs for a glass of coconut water (which doesn’t replace hunger for blood but can take the edge off it, and which Laura had asked her father to buy for Carmilla before they arrived) from the small refrigerator, she finds Bruce awake too, downstairs in flannel pants and a t-shirt advertising some county fair. 

“...Oh,” Carmilla says, surprised, standing there wearing nothing but a soft night dress and red fuzzy socks that Laura had gotten her a few months ago. “Good morning,” she says. 

“Good morning, Carmilla,” Bruce responds. He’s making coffee, the sound of it percolating gently bubbling through the immediate area, a mug that has WORLD’S BEST DADDY written on it in sloppy child’s hand that Carmilla just _knows_ is Laura’s sitting ready on the counter. “Your coconut water’s towards the back, if that’s what you’re looking for. Would you like some coffee?” 

Carmilla doesn’t particularly like coffee, but she doesn’t feel like she’s particularly in a position to decline either, so she says “Yes, thank you,” and then pours herself a glass of the cold, cloudy liquid from the refrigerator, sipping at it. 

When the coffee’s ready, Bruce hands Carmilla a mug, this one with the logo of some pharmaceutical company on it, before pouring his own. “Laura tends to sleep a little late,” he says, affectionately, as the two of them sit at the breakfast bar side by side. “In comparison to me, anyway.”

The vampire almost laughs. “Usually I’m the one sleeping late, but I didn’t really sleep all that well last night,” she admits. “New place, I guess?” 

“Could be,” Bruce says, sipping placidly at his coffee. Carmilla doesn’t want to appear rude, so she picks up her mug and takes a sip too, trying not to make a face. Coffee, even with the several sugar cubes that she’s dropped into it, tastes more or less like concentrated river pollution. “Anyway. So Laura tells me that you’re a philosophy student?” 

“Yes, sir,” Carmilla responds. She doesn’t ever call anybody formal titles like sir or ma’am, but this seems like a solid exception to that rule. “Second year.” She’s dropped her age back again, at least officially, so that she and Laura can “graduate” in the same class. It’s not like she hasn’t taken all these classes a thousand times, anyway. And this will probably be the last time, actually, now that she’s not forced to come back to Silas University anymore. 

She shifts on the stool, sipping at first the coffee and then the coconut water to get the taste of coffee out of her mouth. “Your house is lovely,” she says, and he smiles. There are crow’s feet clear around his eyes when he does, and it makes him look less intimidating, for some reason. 

“Thank you,” he says. “It’s fallen a bit into disarray with Laura gone, she helped out with the cleaning a lot. I do the best I can, though. Did you want some breakfast?” 

Proper “breakfast” for Carmilla is probably going to be some of the blood she smuggled in her suitcase by filling shampoo bottles and other opaque containers with it. “I don’t usually get hungry in the mornings, so I’m okay,” she says, instead of giving that piece of information up. 

Bruce gets up from his stool, and opens a door to what Carmilla finds out is the pantry, withdrawing a box of cereal and pouring himself a bowl. Carmilla isn’t sure what to do with herself, but takes the opportunity when his back is turned to empty half of her mug of coffee into a nearby potted plant silently, so it looks like she’s drunk more than she has. Bruce sits back down at the breakfast bar with his cereal, floating in milk, a spoon in his right hand.

“So how long have you and Laura been together now?” he asks. 

Carmilla pretends like she has to think of the expanse of time. “A year and a month,” she responds, running a black-painted nail along the rim of her half-empty glass of coconut water. “She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” She says it softly, and it’s not just trying to play into Laura’s father’s good book. She means it, with every fiber of her being. 

“Me too,” Bruce responds, and it’s a weird moment of commonality, where they exchange glances, and Carmilla can’t help but smile. 

“Morning,” comes a sleepy voice from the doorway to the kitchen, and they both look over to find a drowsy Laura stretching, one of Carmilla’s old hoodies over her pajama pants. “I’m missing a party, it looks like. Carm, are you okay? You’re never up this early.” 

“Couldn’t sleep,” says Carmilla, and Laura mouths sorry at her when her father’s focusing on his cereal.

She saunters into the kitchen, her phone held in her hand. “The group text blew up just now,” she says to her dad. “The one with Casey and Elena and Max. They heard I’m in town, they want to go to lunch today.” 

Carmilla knows who these people are. Laura’s little group in high school. She genuinely loves them, and still values their friendship, but the fact of the matter is that most of the people in this little town have stayed in this little town, either not attending college or attending the local community college so that they can get a job as a nurse or aide in town or something similar. So they’re not overly close anymore. 

“You should take Carmilla,” Bruce suggests, and the vampire looks wide-eyed from him to Laura and back again, trepidatious at the prospect of meeting more new people on this trip that she feels like she has to impress. 

Laura sees both her father’s encouraging expression and Carmilla’s one of mild panic. “It’s barely ten AM and they want to go at one, I can keep them waiting for an answer for a little while. Right now I want some breakfast.” And she pours herself a bowl of cereal, sitting on Carmilla’s other side at the third and final stool, leaning over to kiss the vampire good morning on the cheek.

“I figured we could make dinner tonight,” Laura’s father says, and Laura nods. She’s glad--she hasn’t had a home-cooked meal in entirely too long. “I have to work a little, of course clients just keep calling and calling a few days before Christmas when they know I won’t be working. “So you can have the day, just be back by five or so, to make sure we have plenty of time to cook.” 

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Laura says brightly, and Bruce, having finished his bowl of cereal and drained the milk dregs at the bottom of the bowl, puts it in the sink and then heads upstairs to get dressed. Laura turns to her girlfriend, who’s dumping the rest of her coffee into the potted plant with an expression of disgust on her face. “Why did you take it? I know you hate coffee.” 

“He offered,” mutters the girl, and Laura laughs. 

“Silly, silly vampire. Anyway, are you up for lunch? They’ll love you.” 

“Meeting your old friends? I have a feeling your style of people has shifted a little since you left here,” Carmilla says, sucking her bottom lip between her teeth and looking sideways at her girlfriend. 

“Yes, but I’d like to see them again, and if I don’t take you I’m afraid you’ll be bored, just sitting around here reading or whatever.” A little twinkle of mischief slips into Laura’s eyes, as she leans over with one of her adorably dorky smiles all over her mouth that makes Carmilla want to kiss it off her, take a thousand photographs so that she can look at it all the time. “Besides. Maybe I want to show you off. Maybe I want to brag about the fact that I landed myself the most gorgeous girlfriend on this hemisphere.” 

Carmilla likes to pretend that she’s immune to flattery, but she’s definitely not, not at all. The idea of showing off to Laura’s friends appeals to her immensely. “Fine,” she agrees, with an indulgent little roll of her eyes, and Laura, pleased with her answer, lets out a little squeal and kisses her, just an appreciative little press of lips. “I had better go get dressed, then, hm?” 

“Probably a good idea,” Laura responds. “I mean, as much as I like you in a nightdress, it might be a little flimsy for the general public.” 

Another eye-roll, another small kiss on the lips, and Carmilla saunters upstairs, pulling things out of her suitcase and eventually deciding on one of the outfits she’d bought yesterday, a deep purple flared skirt and simple black long-sleeve, just the right amount of leg, just the right amount of cleavage. Of course, if she’s going to be showing off to Laura’s friends, she wants to look the part of the most gorgeous girlfriend on the hemisphere. Two even eyeliner wings and a few daubs of mascara later, she’s in Laura’s room watching her standing in front of her closet wearing nothing but underwear and a tank top, a sight she thinks she could look at forever. 

The world doesn’t work that way. Laura doesn’t much like the idea of going out in the cold that she feels far more than Carmilla does in her current state, so she pulls on jeans and a pink sweater that clings to her in ways that makes Carmilla want to put her hands all over her. God, but she is _ridiculously_ attracted to this girl. 

(Carmilla’s wearing the same shoes as yesterday and black knee socks with bows on them, and Laura’s quietly thinking about the merits of jumping her bones when her father’s working less than twenty feet away, even though it is through a couple of walls. God, but she is _ridiculously_ attracted to this girl.) 

In any case, once they’re both done dressing, Laura closes the door and they snuggle up together on Laura’s bed. “Making up for last night,” Carmilla says pointedly, and Laura laughs, a little sheepishly. 

“You heard him, my dad was probably up making sure that we _didn’t_ end up in the same room. I’ll have to have a talk with him about the fact that it was acceptable to separate my girlfriends and I in high school, but now since I literally live in the same room with you all the time, there’s really no point.” 

“Good. Because I barely got any sleep last night,” Carmilla grumbles. Laura’s heart seizes up, and she kisses the top of her head gently. She’s holding Carmilla, despite the fact that the vampire is objectively bigger than her. Still, she knows that Carm likes to be held, having not had the privilege for so long. Even big scary vampires deserve to be the little spoon sometimes. At least that’s what Laura tells her, and Carmilla has never _complained_ about it in so many words. 

Their conversation is incredibly easy, and Laura isn’t quite sure why. She’s never been overly good at talking to people for sustained lengths of time, whether it be because her life hadn’t been all that interesting before Silas University came into her life or because she could just never think of anything to say. But she and Carmilla never seem to tire of each other, never get bored even of the same stories over and over again. 

Not to mention that Carmilla has centuries worth of stories to tell, so Laura hasn’t heard all of them, not even after a year of sleeping in the same bed every night, spending their mornings and evenings together and sometimes the afternoons, too, when Fate gives them a time when neither of them have classes or other pursuits to dedicate their hours to. 

They’re just absently engaged in conversation, gentle physical affection. They take a brief break from using their mouths to speak, but after a solid ten minutes of making out, Laura pushes Carmilla off her, shaking her head ruefully and brushing down her newly tousled hair. “I can’t do this when he’s in the next room,” she says, a laugh creeping into her voice. “That’s just wrong on like four levels.” 

“Doesn’t feel wrong to me, sugar,” Carmilla’s breathing against her neck, but she acquiesces anyway, and instead pulls Laura to sit on her lap, her own back against the headboard, arms around the girl’s waist and her chin resting on her shoulder. Anything for Laura. Of course, anything for her. She checks the clock--it’s noon, not so long until they’ll have to leave for this lunch. 

“Did you get any blood?” Laura asks, drawing Carmilla’s attention back to her. 

“No,” the vampire says, walking her fingers up Laura’s arm, covered with that soft, beautiful sweater. “Figured I’d save it until I can’t wait anymore. I don’t have an unlimited supply.” 

And Laura, God bless her sweet, generous soul, brushes her hair to one side, leaving her neck exposed. “Here,” she says. “No physical activity planned in the next twenty-four hours, that’s the rule for when someone donates blood, right?” 

“I cannot believe I have a girlfriend that advocates for consensual blood consumption,” Carmilla murmurs, her lips turning up in a smile even as she feels her fangs slip out from behind her ostensibly human canines. “I won’t take much.” 

“Take what you need,” says Laura, tilting her head to the side, encouraging her. Carmilla very carefully bites down, trying to inflict the least pain possible, and gently sucks the resulting swell of blood from the fresh wound. 

“Wouldn’t it be a trip if my dad were to come in _now,_ ” Laura says with a laugh in her voice, startlingly relaxed for someone who currently has a vampire’s fangs buried in her skin. Though they aren’t for much longer--Carmilla surfaces, tongues over the resulting holes to encourage them to scab, and gives Laura a quick kiss on the cheek. 

“Well, he didn’t, so. Count our blessings.” 

So by the time they leave the house twenty minutes or so later, Laura’s added a securely tied scarf to her outfit, and Carmilla’s lips are stained a shade or two darker, and she feels a lot better about having to go and stomach human food now that she’s full of what she actually needs to survive. They get in the car and hold hands as Laura drives, and the cold is crisp when it comes through the windows, but neither of them really mind because, as they establish when Laura’s pulling out of her neighborhood, both of them are going to order hot chocolate when they get to the restaurant. 

Laura’s friends are already there by the time they push open the door--it’s a small place, serving multiple kinds of Asian food, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese. All three of them produce cries of happiness when they see Laura, leading Carmilla by the hand over to the table, and they get up and wrap her in a tight group hug that Carmilla feels awkward being in, so she takes her hand from Laura’s and just stands by watching with a half-smile. 

“This is my girlfriend, Carmilla!” Laura introduces when the hug-fest is over, gesturing at the girl in question, who steps forward and gives Elena, Casey, and Max an incline of her head and the same small smile. 

“Nice to meet you,” she says, and she can see them looking her over. Elena, who it seems doesn’t have much subtlety, mouths _she’s gorgeous_ to Laura, who gives a thumbs up and responds _I know._

They sit back down, and when the waitress comes over, hot chocolates are ordered, along with two glasses of water and miso soup for Laura. Carmilla nibbles at the fried lo mein noodles in a bowl on the table, participating in conversation as best she can considering a lot of it is reminiscing moments of Laura’s life that she wasn’t present for, though she’s heard a lot about. She eats sushi, which is not unpleasant now that it’s not her only source of sustenance for the day, sips at the sweet hot chocolate, even sweeter than Laura’s blood. There’s a lot of laughing, and a lot of fabrication on Carmilla’s part--around Laura’s friends, Carmilla grew up in a small house in Styria to a mother that died just after she’d turned eighteen. 

Past that, they’re honest. Carmilla plays piano and violin and sings beautifully (and demurs a request from Max to grace the restaurant with something by Nicki Minaj), she loves philosophy and history. She doesn’t know why she’d been so apprehensive towards the idea of meeting Laura’s old friends. If Laura picked them to spend her time with, then how intimidating could they actually be? 

For Laura’s part, God, is she happy. She’s missed her friends in a certain kind of way. And she definitely is not immune to the heady feeling of pride that she gets when Carmilla gracefully gets up to use the restroom, brushing dark hair over her shoulder, and the three of them lean forward, suddenly in hardcore gossip mode. 

“She dropped out of a Victoria’s Secret fashion show,” contributes Max. 

“Or a painting,” adds Elena. 

“Good for Laura!” Casey crows, clapping her on the shoulder. “Landing the hottest girl this podunk town has ever seen her first year of college. You are an idol we can all aspire to.” 

“Thank you, thank you,” Laura says graciously, just as Carmilla comes back. 

“I assume you’ve all been talking about me,” she says, settling herself back down and smoothing the pleats of her skirt. 

Laura leans over and kisses her on the cheek, prompting “aww”s from her friends. “Not at all, Carm. Not at all.”


	4. Caroling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neighborhood caroling is a tradition the Hollis family doesn't miss out on. And this year, Carmilla joins.

This time, Carmilla successfully sneaks into Laura’s bedroom, since her father goes to bed early that night. It’s nearly midnight when Laura hears the door open, and she’s relieved to see the gentle silhouette of her girlfriend in the doorway before she closes it behind her and pads over to the edge of her bed. 

“Hi,” she murmurs. “Care if I join?” 

“Hi,” Laura responds, and moves over, giving Carmilla room. “Not at all.” 

So Carmilla gets a much better night’s sleep. They wake up together in the morning, Laura’s arms wrapped tight around Carmilla’s waist and her thigh between Carm’s knees, her head neatly tucked under her chin. The smell of pancakes wafts through the house, and that’s what coaxes the non-vampire among this couple to prod her girlfriend awake to extract herself, heading downstairs, leaving Carmilla lolling about for just a little while longer. 

“Hi, sweetie,” her father says when she comes downstairs, wearing a turtleneck to conceal the bite mark on her neck, and a soft pair of fleece-lined leggings he’d gotten for her the Christmas before. “Figured I’d keep the tradition going. I miss having someone around to make pancakes for on the weekends.” 

Laura beams, and hugs her father, avoiding the spatula spattered with chocolate chips in his hand. “I love you,” she says, and is struck by just how many times she’s said those words in the past year and a half, to her dad, to Carmilla, to her friends--all different types of love, but all worthy of the phrase. She’s so full of love, especially now, especially around Christmas when the whole _air_ is full of love. 

“Love you too, honey,” her dad responds, before flipping a perfectly browned pancake on the griddle with the hand that’s not around his daughter’s shoulders. “So, decorations today, and then caroling tonight. Sound okay to you?” 

“Sounds just fine with me. I’ll talk to Carm, I don’t know how she feels about caroling but I know she can sing. She’s just not super into singing in front of other people.” 

“Gossiping about me?” The familiar, sleep-husky voice comes from the doorway before Carmilla draws into the room, her messy hair pulled up in a bun on top of her head, still wearing her night dress and a _different pair_ of fuzzy socks. These ones are Laura’s. 

Laura grins at her. “Always,” she says, blowing her a kiss. Carmilla sardonically catches it and presses it to her heart, winking before sauntering over to the refrigerator and pouring out a glass of coconut water. “I’m just saying, I always try to get you to sing in front of Perry because she doesn’t believe me how good you are, but you never do.” 

“Why would I waste the time warming up my voice to sing to Perry?” Carmilla asks, swirling the coconut water in her glass and then taking a sip. “I’ll go caroling, though. I know all the old songs.” She’s getting into dangerous territory, since by _old songs_ she means she literally knows old hymns in Latin that stretch back for centuries, things that she saw Mozart play in concert. 

Laura squeaks, joy overflowing in that little noise from her throat, and Carmilla and Bruce smile indulgently simultaneously. 

Breakfast is lazy, slow, full of casual conversation. Carmilla learns that she likes chocolate chip pancakes. Laura learns that the most adorable version of Carmilla thus far is a Carmilla with her hair up and her makeup wiped off, chocolate staining the corner of her mouth and her pale skin lit up by a beam of sunlight that falls through the window and slants onto her. Of course, as soon as it touches her and Laura snapshots the tableau in her mind, she winces a little and shifts out of the sunlight. It doesn’t burn her, and she can certainly survive it, but she prefers to keep her skin covered or to stay in the shade, lest the bright rays cause her discomfort. When she describes it to Laura, Laura thinks it sounds like having a bad sunburn, nausea and all. 

When it’s done, Bruce pushes back his chair, takes all the dishes off the table and puts them in the sink. “I’ll get these,” he says. “Can you and Carmilla go and take down the boxes of decorations in the attic? I’m going to drive out and pick up the tree, and you girls can unload the ornaments and lights and such to put up when I get back.” 

“Sounds like a plan, Dad!” Laura says. “Carm, come on.” 

And she leads the way up to the attic, a small, half-finished space accessed by a small staircase through a door next to the bathroom. There’s a pile of boxes labeled XMAS in the corner in thick black marker. “All these come down,” Laura says, and Carmilla clicks her tongue. 

“Quite a bit of stuff, cupcake,” she says, even as she picks up one box in each arm, holding them as easily as if they were balloons. 

“We have a lot of ornaments,” Laura says, with a sheepish little grin and a shrug. “Dad puts the stuff outside up, and I do the Christmas tree. Well, I guess _we_ do the Christmas tree this year. Mom and I used to do it, but then...well, yeah, you know. She’s not around anymore.” 

Carmilla wonders about Laura’s mother. She tells casual stories about her every so often, but doesn’t really talk about her illness, her death, or her funeral. Of course, Carm isn’t going to ask, but she does hope that one day Laura might tell her. She drinks up details about Laura like the soft drops of her blood, committing them to memory. “Well,” she says, sensing that Laura doesn’t really want to talk about this anymore. “Means your work’s cut in half, now. I haven’t decorated a Christmas tree in a couple of hundred years, it could be fun.” 

Laura smiles, and she picks up a box, making a little sound of effort. And so they start hauling boxes down two flights of stairs, stacking them all in the living room. There’s a triptych-style window that Carmilla assumes the tree goes in, so she sets all the ones labeled “ornaments” or “tree lights” near it, all the ones labeled “outside lights” by the door. “This is taking a lot less time than it usually does,” Laura comments, while Carmilla stacks a fourth heavy box on top of the pile in her arms and sets to taking them all down the stairs. 

“Perks of a vampire girlfriend,” Carmilla calls back over her shoulder. Luckily, Bruce has already left the house to pick up the tree--the car is gone from the driveway. 

“I love my vampire girlfr--oh, gosh, oh, no!” she hears from upstairs. Laura has gotten excited about her confession of love (if it can be called a confession if she’s known it for more than a year) and dropped a box. Carmilla laughs, loud, the way only Laura can draw out of her, and sets down her boxes to go assist.

Five minutes later, everything is downstairs and they have determined that a string of lights is broken but it’s an extra one anyway. Laura goes upstairs to get dressed and Carmilla joins her, detouring to the guest room to pick up a pair of skinny jeans and a thin black sweater and then changes in Laura’s room.

Laura catches her when she’s just wearing a bra and the jeans, the same fuzzy socks, her hair still up on top of her head, and she distracts her pretty efficiently until they hear a car pull up into the driveway. 

“Cupcake, I swear,” Carmilla’s panting, trying to put herself back together, redoing the zip on her jeans, actually putting her sweater on, and brushing her hair quickly. “Can’t tease me like that.” 

Laura, for her part, has a self-satisfied little smirk on her face, braiding her hair with deft fingers and tying off the end with an elastic. “Preview,” she says with a shrug, as she darts out of the room and runs downstairs to help her father carry in the Christmas tree.

Carmilla’s response, after Laura’s already out of the room, is a long, sustained groan with her head tipped back, trying to shake off the electricity thrumming through her physiologically improbable body. “Goddamnit,” she sighs, ties her hair back up on top of her head, and then runs down to help as well. 

The next several hours are spent nigh-on tangled up in lights on everyone’s part--Bruce takes a ladder outside and starts edging the house with festive strings of little bulbs. Laura and Carmilla are working on stringing the tree, and when they’re done, they move to ornaments. They alternate between having casual conversation and coexisting in comfortable silence. Carmilla hangs every ornament she’s given ever so carefully, handling the fragile pieces of art like they’re going to shatter in her hands. When they’re done, they stand back, turning on the lights and looking at their handiwork. 

“It’s beautiful,” sighs Laura, leaning against Carmilla’s side. The vampire wraps her arm around her waist, nuzzling her nose into her sweet-smelling hair. 

“You’re beautiful,” she responds, predictably, and Laura laughs, letting it roll out. God, but Carmilla loves the sound of that laugh. 

They take a selfie with the Christmas tree with Carmilla’s phone, Laura’s eyes towards the camera and her lips pressed on Carmilla’s cheek, a small grin on Carmilla’s face, her dark eyes brightened by the lights and by Laura’s proximity. Laura posts it on her Twitter and Carmilla shudders to think of the comments, though she does like the photo purely because that’s just what you do when your girlfriend posts a picture of you.

An early dinner of tomato basil soup and grilled cheese sandwiches is made by Laura. Carmilla watches her cook with something like fascination--their dorm kitchen is woefully undersupplied, and when she makes anything, it’s generally baked goods. She moves around this kitchen so easily, and Carmilla is content to just sit on the counter and watch her. Bruce is reading a murder mystery novel, sitting on an armchair in the adjoining living room. The house is warm, and it smells like cooking food, and Laura has the most beautiful expression on her face that Carmilla suddenly has the itching urge to draw, to paint. She gets a piece of computer paper and a ballpoint pen, sets it on a phone book in her lap, and sets to immortalizing the lovely curve of her nose, the gentle slope of her pale neck, adorned with a thin scarf. 

And she actually eats the dinner that Laura makes, maybe because the dark richness of the tomato soup looks an awful lot like blood, and maybe because even human food tastes good when it’s crafted by the hands of somebody that Carmilla loves. 

Laura finds the drawing, a lovingly sketched likeness of her softly smiling face, next to the sink when she goes to clear the table and put the dishes down to wash later. Again, she’s struck by Carmilla’s expanse of skill, things that she can just pick up and put down on a whim. She carefully moves it aside onto a different counter, not wanting water to splash onto it. 

“Did Carmilla draw this?” her father asks, when he comes and takes up a sponge. It’s how it always goes. If he cooks, she does the dishes. If she cooks, he does the dishes. If they both cook, he washes and she dries. 

“Yeah,” says Laura, unable to keep that stupid beamy smile off her face. Carmilla, for her part, has slunk upstairs, sipping blood out of a shampoo bottle. “God, she’s good at everything.” 

“I like her,” Bruce says, and if it’s possible, Laura’s smile grows even more. 

“You do?!” Of course, she had known that he would, or at least hoped it, but hearing the verbal affirmation is something that means more to her than she had predicted it would. 

Her father nods, as he turns on the hot water and puts soap on the sponge in his hand. “She’s a little quiet. But very sweet, and she seems to be very into you.” 

A blush spreads across Laura’s cheeks, and her smile is bashful. “Yeah, well,” she admits. “I’m really into her. So. I guess that works out pretty well.” 

Laura’s father gives her a soft smile, something in his face...like he’s seeing his little girl grown up, twenty years old now, a girlfriend, a semester and a half into her college education. Empowered, strong, independent. “I’ve got the dishes, kiddo,” he says. “Caroling at seven, okay?” 

“Mmkay,” Laura agrees, and takes the drawing, running up the stairs to find Carmilla lounging on her bed, tipping her head back and squeezing her shampoo bottle, dark, viscous liquid into her mouth. Laura puts the drawing on her desk and then does a flying leap onto her bed, on top of Carmilla, kissing her--it’s messy, because she’s smiling and Carmilla’s smiling, and there’s the faint metallic tang of blood between their mouths. 

Carmilla puts a hand at the small of Laura’s back, quirking an eyebrow up at her when they pull apart. “I should draw things for you more often,” she remarks, “if this is the thank you I get.” 

“Oh, ssh, you,” comes the response, and Carmilla flicks the shampoo bottle closed, discards it over the side of the bed to get both her hands free when Laura leans back down. 

“Any chance of finishing what you started earlier?” Carmilla’s hopeful, especially given that Laura’s currently running a hand up her denim-covered thigh, the other one supporting her on an elbow so that she can hover over Carm’s face. 

“We’re leaving the house in twenty minutes,” Laura says, “and my father’s going to be coming up to change. Not a chance, beautiful.” She’s teasing, leaning down to peck Carmilla on the lips again. “I just wanted to show some gratitude for that gorgeous drawing. I love you so much.” 

Carmilla leans up and kisses Laura on the nose. “I love you,” she responds, and hugs the girl to her for a long moment before they break apart, Laura going to find a jacket, mittens, and a hat. Carmilla slips a beanie onto her head, not for cold, just for aesthetic purposes, the same reason she adds one of Laura’s adorkably oversized cardigans. They’re downstairs at seven o’clock precisely. 

Laura’s mittened hand fits awkwardly in Carmilla’s bare one as they meet up with a gaggle of neighbors, all of whom are cooing over Laura immediately, asking “is this your girlfriend?” and “how old are you now, sugar?” and “how’s school going?” By the time they actually get going, Carmilla can’t wait to start singing, which is much easier than holding a grin together. 

When they don’t know the words, Carmilla pulls them up on her phone. When the group is struggling with the notes, Carmilla’s clear, high voice leads them without even trying. And when Laura gives her those pleading eyes and asks her to sing something, something old...well, Carmilla just can’t really resist her, now can she? 

So she’s in the middle of a circle of bundled-up people who have known her girlfriend since she was born, singing Ecce quod Natura with her eyes half-lidded, the words streaming effortlessly from her throat. When she finishes _(“deo coequari, per conjugina...”)_ , there’s a smattering of applause. She curtsies in the way she’d been taught all those centuries ago, and then sinks back into Laura’s embrace, moving away from the limelight, which she hates as a general rule of thumb. 

“Thank you,” Laura murmurs, kissing her on the cheek and squeezing her hand. Her lips move to Carmilla’s ear, whispering. “And the second my dad goes out for more than an hour, you’re all mine.” 

“Merry Christmas Eve, cupcake,” Carmilla murmurs back, a smile playing around the corners of her mouth. 

“Merry Christmas Eve, Carmilla.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas Eve to my wonderful secret santa (queercarmilla) and to all of the other readers of this fic!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Christmas!!

Laura has a Talk with her father while Carmilla is showering that night--it deserves the capital letters, because it’s awkward and they’re sitting across the table from each other. 

“I’m twenty years old, Dad,” Laura starts. “And I know I’m still your little girl and all, but I am an adult, and I’m in a serious relationship, and...” God, she’s blushing. “I’m used to sleeping in the same bed with Carmilla. I haven’t been able to sleep as well with her in the other room. I know that it’s the same for her. I swear we won’t...do anything you wouldn’t want, it’s just hard to sleep. So...are you okay if...?” 

And by that time Bruce is laughing, shaking his head, motioning for Laura to stop talking before she digs herself deeper into this spiral of embarrassment. “It’s fine, Laura,” he says. “I trust you. And I trust Carmilla. And I remember what it was like. I was your age not too long ago.” He winks, and Laura rolls her eyes, a laugh bubbling up from her own throat in relief. 

Carmilla, when she learns the news, tries to get Laura to come into the shower with her. “Don’t push your luck,” says Laura, and blows her a kiss before shutting the door. 

So Carmilla gets into bed and spoons her girlfriend, thank God, though of course she isn’t actually planning on sleeping that much that night. She waits until Laura is asleep, and then ever so gently disentangles herself, making her escape out the window and setting out to a little place she knows for the perfect Christmas presents. She already knows what she wants, and where to find it. It’s almost like a cursory errand, though it’s pretty damn difficult getting someone that will wrap one’s Christmas presents at one in the morning on actual, literal Christmas. 

Still, she manages it. By the time she’s back in the same position that she had left, hand splayed onto Laura’s bare stomach, legs tangled together, her nose nuzzling into the back of her neck. “Mmh. No leaving me,” Laura murmurs drowsily, and shifts even closer in her drowsy state. 

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Carmilla whispers against her hair, pressing a kiss to the side of her neck, where bite marks are healing. 

Christmas morning is greeted with breakfast smells from downstairs, but not of pancakes this time--of something wafting cinnamon scents up the stairs. It wakes both of them up, though Laura goes down the stairs before Carmilla does. She finds her father taking cinnamon buns out of the oven. 

“Merry Christmas!” she greets. 

“Merry Christmas,” her father responds, with a grin in her direction. “Did you sleep better last night?” 

“Very much so,” says Laura truthfully, and she pours herself a glass of water, sneaks a piece off an entirely too hot cinnamon bun that she then has to toss from hand to hand until it’s cool enough to eat. Carmilla comes down stifling a yawn, with two wrapped presents that she carefully places under the tree. 

“Wow, cutting it a little close, Carm?” Laura asks, and Carmilla smirks. 

“You know very well I have had these in my suitcase this whole time, cupcake,” she says, batting her eyelashes. Laura, in contrast, knows very well that Carmilla had gone out the night before to go and get them , but the alternate statement is for her father’s benefit. “I just figured I’d add the element of surprise and wait to put them down here.” 

Laura’s father is cutting up the cinnamon buns, doling them out onto three plates. Carmilla, ever one for sweets especially since she’d just taken a couple of hits from her blood supply, suddenly feels yet another rush of affection for Bruce. This time based on his cooking. “Well, the way we do things around here is breakfast, then presents,” he says. “If that’s alright with you.” 

“Perfectly fine with me,” Carmilla confirms, and sits next to Laura at the breakfast bar. The television is playing some old Christmas movie with the volume muted and the subtitles on but clearly not matching up with the dialogue--Carmilla reads the lips of the characters instead, though she can’t all the time because during outdoor scenes all of the character seem to have an aversion to any style of bundling up besides slapping scarves across their mouths. 

It’s peaceful. Carmilla can’t remember the last time she had a peaceful Christmas--her mother had always used it as an excuse, taking Carmilla to the parties that people threw all around major cities, dressing her up to the nines and then sending her to entrap the latest in her string of abductees. Most holidays had been treated like that, actually, and so Carmilla has come to associate holidays with negative emotion. But for the first time in a long time, she feels like it could be accessible to her to feel the warmth that the characters in the movies feel, what people are supposed to feel at Christmas. 

After all, she’s sitting with the girl she loves most in the world and her father that likes her a lot more than she had originally anticipated, with a tree all lit up and decorated with beautiful ornaments, eating good food, nothing to do, nowhere to be, just gifts to open and eventually a dinner to cook. There isn’t any snow, but Carmilla’s spent Christmas in Australia before--there, it’s burning hot on Christmas. Not so necessary to have precipitation. 

Still, Bruce puts on the radio and someone is crooning something about snow falling outside their window on Christmas Eve, and if possible the domestic, wonderful atmosphere expanded. 

Eventually, everyone is finished with the cinnamon buns, and they sit down on the couch (Laura and Carmilla) and armchair (Bruce) in the living room. Laura plays Father Christmas and divvies up the wrapped gifts under the tree. “You first, Dad,” she encourages, and Bruce nods. He has four separate packages from Laura and one from Carmilla, which makes Carmilla think for a second maybe she should have gotten something more, but when he peels the wrapping paper off of the gorgeous, leather-bound datebook and day planner, designed in script, handcrafted and with stationary to die for, his reaction sufficiently assuages her doubts. She’d gotten it in Egypt. 

“This is gorgeous,” he breathes out, holding it up. “Seriously, Carmilla, where did you even get this?” 

“I travel a lot,” she says, enigmatically enough that he doesn’t ask again. 

Laura mouths _good one_ at her. Carmilla gives her a subtle thumbs up. “Now my gifts seem kind of facile,” Laura remarks, quirking one side of her mouth ruefully. 

“Stop that,” her father says, chuckling and pointing a finger at her. “First of all, you know better than anyone that it’s the thought that counts. Second of all, these feel an awful lot like things that I am desperately in need of...and in fact they are!” He holds up the first of the sweaters, the navy one that Laura had picked out, and the girl is smiling and laughing as he pretends to be surprised after every new sweater. He tries one on right then and there, and keeps it on while he gestures to Carmilla. “Your turn?” 

“Oh,” Carmilla says, having forgotten about the two wrapped gifts in her lap what with her stress as to whether or not Bruce would like the gift that she had gotten for him. But her attention is drawn back to them now, and she picks up the one from Bruce first. It’s heavy, square--she’s deduced that it’s a book, but she’s delighted to see a smooth, gold-lettered, leather-bound set of the collected essays of Albert Camus. 

“Laura told me he’s your favorite, and I know a bookbinder in town,” he says, his tone of voice the same as Laura’s had been when she had been afraid that he wouldn’t like her gift. 

Carmilla’s smile, when it appears on her face, is a genuine one. “This is incredible,” she says, and Bruce doesn’t know what her genuine happiness looks like when it shines through her face, but Laura does, and she watches it beam like the sun on her girlfriend’s eyes, in the part of her lips, in her hands splayed over the cover. “Thank you so much.” And she gets up, hugging Bruce carefully around his shoulders. He’s clearly surprised, but pats her back anyway. 

“Everyone is outdoing me on gift-giving!” Laura complains, and Carmilla laughs, opening up the package labeled with her girlfriend’s loopy handwriting. It’s the entire box set of the Twilight books and movies, and Carmilla is reduced to wheezing laughter the second she sees it. 

“What’s so funny?” Bruce asks, not getting the joke. 

“We just joke about these a lot at school,” Laura says--she’s giggling too, leaning against Carmilla’s side. “So I thought it would be funny to get Carmilla the whole set. For erudition purposes.” 

“You’re the worst,” laughs Carmilla, and kisses her on the mouth without thinking about it. Bruce darts his eyes up towards the ceiling. “Um, sorry.” 

“No worries,” he says. “Just a little difficult for dad, watching his little girl grow up.” 

“Yeah, well, I can’t have grown up too much if I’m ecstatic that you got me a new notebook and coloured gel pens,” Laura’s saying--she’s started opening her gifts, and that’s what comes out first. Then a couple of novels that she’d been wanting to read and a Dalek mug to match her TARDIS one, which is good because Carmilla’s been stealing that one pretty often lately. 

She gets to the last box and her father clears her throat. “Open that one last, okay? Do Carmilla’s first.” 

“Okay,” Laura shrugs, and turns instead to Carm’s neatly wrapped package. 

Carmilla watches her girlfriend unwrap an original script for the pilot of Veronica Mars with a satisfied smile on her face, that only grows when Laura gives a little squeak of amazement. It’s signed by Kristen Bell and Percy Daggs III, in a laminated little folder, and Laura holds it like it’s going to fall apart. 

“This is _so cool,"_ she says, enthusiastically, and now that her father has implicitly given the okay for kisses in front of him, she leans over and plants on on her girlfriend, who accepts it with a grin. Carmilla has never really had to give gifts before. Will and her mother had not been particularly about the warm and fuzzy Christmas spirit. So this is new, and it’s nice, and she intends to savor the expression on Laura’s face forever. 

“And this one,” Laura says, picking up the last one from her father. “The one I was supposed to save for last.” 

“You’ll see why,” Bruce says, unable to keep from smiling. 

Laura does see why, the second she unwraps an iPhone. “What, you think that flip phone isn’t good enough for me?” she asks sardonically, grinning at her father. 

“I figured it was time for a step up.” 

“Eeeee, thank you, thank you, _thank you!”_ It bursts out of Laura as she flings her arms around her father. “Best Christmas _ever!”_

Later, she tells Carmilla that her _real_ Christmas present is waiting for the opportune time. That’s whispered in her ear when she corners Carmilla in the bathroom while she’s doing her makeup, with the vampire backed up against the sink and her hands coming to rest on the gentle curve of Laura’s waist. The smell of Christmas dinner is wafting up the stairs, nothing particularly difficult to make, enough turkey, applesauce, green beans, pie, and hot chocolate for three and some (but not too much) left over. 

“I thought the Twilight books was the best it could get,” Carmilla laughs, as Laura’s running a hand up the inside of her bare thigh, up her skirt. God, but she is a tease, and Carmilla knows it, and Laura knows it, and they both enjoy it in different ways. 

“Think again,” Laura murmurs, but they end the encounter after a bit of indulgent yet torrid making out, after which Carmilla has to fix her makeup again. Laura, for her part, flounces down to help Bruce with dinner. 

_What a good Christmas,_ drifts across Carmilla’s mind while she’s screwing the cap back on her eyeliner. 

_What a good Christmas, Laura thinks,_ covering her hands with oven mitts to retrieve the turkey and set it on top of a stove burner to cool.


	6. Snow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It snows!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FYI, this is the chapter that makes the fic M rated. ;)

They go to sleep with full stomachs--Carmilla hasn’t eaten this much human food in one sitting in a very long time, and she feels for a few solid minutes like she’s going to get sick but a few deep breaths and a break outside in the cold air, getting colder with every passing moment, assuages her confused stomach. And so does a few sips of blood from the containers she’d brought along--she has to ration them, or else find some way to refill them, not wanting to take from Laura too often. First because, obviously, she doesn’t want her to be physically compromised in case she wants to do something active. Second because if her father notices fang-shaped marks on her neck there might be some ominous conversations in her future.

Carmilla aspires to be fully established as liked as Carmilla the Girlfriend before she introduces herself as Carmilla the Vampire Girlfriend. If that ever even happens. She prefers not to think about it.

Laura, for her part, is a firm believer of the idea that the calories don’t count if you cooked the food yourself. Not that she particularly cares about calories in the first place. When she curls up against Carmilla, she feels such love for everyone in her life. She texts LaFontaine, Perry, and Kirsch, wishing them all a happy holidays, from her old phone--she hasn’t figured out her new one, yet. When all the messages are sent, she puts the phone on her bedside table and goes to sleep, one of her hands laced in Carmilla’s.

The sky has changed when they wake up--Christmas day had been crisp and clear but cold, and now the blue sky has been replaced by a steely, austere grave. It looks like snow, is the first thought of Bruce, Carmilla, and Laura as they all look out the window for the first time that morning at different times.

That doesn’t dissuade Bruce from going along with his plans, however. Over a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of coffee, he tells Laura that he’s going to go and visit his friend across town, shoot the breeze, grab some lunch. “How long will you be gone?” asks Laura, thinking of Carmilla still asleep up in her room, making up for the eventful night she’d had on Christmas Eve, running all over the world to collect her presents, and thinking of creative ways to wake her up.

“Just a couple of hours,” her father says. “I don’t really know.”

Too risky, Laura decides, with some regret. She doesn’t consider herself a particularly sexual being, but she does enjoy her intimacy with Carmilla. Just as she’s become accustomed to falling asleep near her, or at the very least knowing that she would be there when she woke up, her body has also become accustomed to that sort of pleasure. And it’s been since the night before they’d left for Laura’s father’s house, longer than usual.

Carmilla’s arrival downstairs snaps her out of that train of thought. “Looks like snow,” she says, whereupon Laura and her father, who had just been having this conversation, both nod.

It certainly looks like snow, but the sky does not act on its appearance until nearly noon, after Laura’s father has taken the car and left for his friend’s house. Carmilla is making hot chocolate, the good kind, made on the stove with milk and actual chocolate, standing vigilant by the stove and stirring it in leggings and a top that shows a strip of midriff between the hem and her waistband. Laura’s sitting on the couch trying to figure out her new phone, syncing it with her computer, all of her thousands of songs funneling onto it through the included charging cable. She sets her ringtone as the theme from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which makes Carmilla laugh, and her text tone the TARDIS noise, which makes Carmilla roll her eyes in fondness for her nerdy girlfriend.

She happens to look up while she’s waiting for a couple of apps to download, and she notices flurries coming down. “Carm!” she cries out, which shocks Carmilla, whose immediate thought is _she’s hurt, she’s just found out something terrible._ She jumps, dropping the spoon that she’s been using to gently stir the hot chocolate to completion onto the linoleum.

“What?!” she asks, with all the terrible things that can course through her mind running through it in that second before Laura continues.

“It’s snowing!”

She has her face pressed against the window, and Carmilla turns the heat on the stove down to join her. “So it is,” she remarks, raising an eyebrow. It starts coming down heavier and heavier, even as they’re watching, starting to coat the road, the trash bins that are on the curb, the yards and sidewalks and cars of Laura’s neighbors.

“Wow,” Carmilla remarks, going back over to stir the chocolate on the stove one more time and then take it off, pouring it into two mugs. Laura supplies marshmallows from the pantry and they both drop two in, curling up on the couch together with their hot beverages and watching the snow falling thickly. Laura’s phone finishes syncing, and she takes it off the charger and sends her first text on it, to her father, asking if he’s okay and if he intends on driving.

He is okay. He does not intend on driving. _Going to stay for dinner here,_ he says in his response to her text message. _I’ll come back when the snow plows have a chance to do their thing and the roads are a little safer._

Laura looks at Carmilla. “When I was a kid, snow days were the best thing that had ever happened to me,” she says. “I loved going out and playing in it, making snowmen, sledding, everything.”

Carmilla’s sipping at her mug of hot chocolate, a pensive expression on her face. “I always liked the way it looks,” she remarks, shifting her gaze out the window again. “Everything covered with that pure whiteness. Like some deity is giving the world a fresh coat of new paint, letting them wash away their sins.”

“I guess that explains snow angels,” Laura laughs. She leans against Carmilla, draining the dregs of her own mug of cocoa and then setting it on the coffee table, on top of one of her father’s magazines about self-defense and protection. He’d offered to get her a subscription sent to her PO box at school, but she had politely declined. “Anyway,” she continues, resting her head on her girlfriend’s shoulder. “The way I see it. We can either put on thousands of layers and go out and ruin all that pure whiteness, and I can relive my childhood fascination with small ice crystals piled on top of her. Or we can stay inside and put our time to...different uses.”

It’s a mark of how content Carmilla is to watch the snow and sip her sweet drink that she hasn’t even considered the possibility of having the house to themselves for potentially hours and hours, now that her father has been trapped on the other side of town by the nigh-on blizzard starting outside. But when Laura suggests it, she raises a finely threaded eyebrow, looks down at her girlfriend with a smirk forming on the corner of her mouth. “Finish what we keep starting?”

“That is indeed what I was suggesting,” Laura confirms, and they’re looking at each other, and then Carmilla smiles a sweet, stupid, genuine smile and she’s laughing softly and Laura’s laughing too, and the vampire is setting her mug down on the table in order to have both hands free when she reaches out for her girlfriend.

They spend a good half an hour on the couch, engaged in the ridiculous sappy foreplay that they always tend to, with a positively stupid amount of sweet kissing, whispers of quiet compliments between parted lips and into ears, hands wandering clothed bodies. When clothes start coming off, though, starting with Laura’s shirt, they relocate upstairs into her bedroom, which at least has a door that closes should Laura’s father unexpectedly reveal his abilities to plow roads and/or drive home in torrential snow.

Laura opens her curtains, letting the soft white light flood into the room, onto her carpet and desk and bedspread and the gentle hands of Carmilla, as she gives herself over to them. Then they’re moving together, swaying gently on a fixed spot next to the edge of her bed before toppling together onto the mattress, kissing the whole way down. The momentum that had started with the removal of Laura’s shirt is now unstoppable, as the pile of clothes on the floor grows, the soft sounds of inhales, exhales, quiet gasps the only sounds in the room.

The silence is that special snowy kind of silence, as the precipitation covers the ground, creeps up the walls of the house and frosts over the windows. It makes them feel like they’re in their own little world, a bubble where nothing exists except for the two of them and the way they’re touching each other’s bodies, falling together, melding and kissing, mussing the sheets.

Carmilla’s just relieved that this time, Laura doesn’t pull away--she removes her leggings, her bra, everything. They’re lying on top of Laura’s duvet, and Carmilla’s kissing down her neck, to the hollow of her throat, around her breasts and midriff and then between her legs, whereupon she removes Laura’s underwear with fumbling hands and sets about pleasuring her. It’s slow, easy. They don’t have to try and parse out their time, hurtle towards climax like bumbling fools. Carmilla has time to be sweet and soft and gentle with her, spending long minutes pleasuring her girlfriend with her tongue, surfacing every so often to look at her face.

Laura’s pleasure always shows on her face. It’s something that Carmilla has always liked about her, the way those eyes close, how either her lips are parted or her teeth are biting into her bottom lip, trying to keep from gasping aloud. “I love you,” Carmilla murmurs against one of her thighs, and then the other, thinking it so hard that she knows that Laura understands even when she’s tongue-deep inside her.

Vampiric patience holds out, and after a good amount of time, Carmilla begins to observe a change in Laura’s reactions--she’s tangling a hand into Carmilla’s curls, the other one gathering a fistful of the duvet. She’s arching, noises bursting from her throat, Carmilla’s name falling from her lips. She’s switched from building arousal to approaching climax, and though she’s forgetting how to communicate it in words, Carm reads it in her body, and takes it as a prompt to redouble her efforts.

Laura comes while Carmilla’s tongue is laying inside her, her thumb brushing over her clitoris, and she coaxes her through it with gentle lips, treasuring every gasp and small moan. When she surfaces, she wipes her mouth, tasting Laura, the scent of her still filling her nostrils, every sense overwhelmed by Laura and her reactions. She only realizes how turned on she is when she’s watching Laura come down from her climax, breathing hard.

“Thank God,” Laura says, and she means it. Her voice is faint, her mind still scrambled, though things are falling back into place with each passing second. She thinks that this may have been better for the deprivation for nearly six days, but she is not going to let Carmilla know that, for fear of this becoming a regular occurrence. Speaking of Carmilla...

“Okay,” she says, sitting up, still a little light-headed. “Come here.”

The snow is still falling outside the window while Laura’s coaxing Carmilla onto her lap, back to front, slipping her fingers inside her. It occurs to Carmilla, while Laura’s whispering something about how beautiful she is into her ear while simultaneously stroking over her g-spot, making Carmilla moan quietly, that this is what people talk about when they talk about _making love._ It’s a term she’s never applied to the sex she’s had before, because it’s just never seemed right. Not even with Ell--the time hadn’t really allowed for much of that, let alone romantic names for it. And she’s quite sure now that the love she has for Laura is even greater than the love she felt for Ell, who loved her when she thought she was a human. Laura, though. Laura knows that the person sitting on her lap quietly pleading for her to keep going, go faster, do that again, sucks blood for nutrition and has a smorgasbord of heightened abilities. And she loves her anyway.

When it’s over (and it’s not over after the first round--they do have hours in front of them, after all, and they use it through climaxes two, three, and for Laura four), they’re lying together, naked and slightly sweaty and exhausted, molded together by the thoroughness of their union, the intimacy that both of them feel.

“Better than playing in the snow,” murmurs Carmilla, thinking about coaxing Laura into the shower with her to wash off the evidence of their afternoon, though that bruise on Carm’s neck (made by playful teeth) isn’t going to wash off.

“Definitely better than playing in the snow,” murmurs Laura in return, thinking about going downstairs and making pancakes for dinner, letting Carmilla mix blood into the syrup.

They lay there for another twenty minutes before they find the motivation to do any of that, shower first, then dinner, then laying on the couch snuggling like fools watching Twilight and making snarky commentary, right up until Laura’s father finally comes home, at nearly one in the morning, after a drive that should have been twenty minutes had taken three hours.

“It’s okay,” he says, when Laura shows sympathy. “I had music, and a very warm sweater thanks to my wonderful daughter.”

The wonderful daughter in question beams, and then laughs as a vampire not nearly as pretty and loving as her girlfriend says something stupid on the screen.

“Did you two have a good afternoon?” If Bruce suspects, it doesn’t show in his tone.

“More or less,” Carmilla says neutrally.

“It was okay,” Laura adds.

When he leaves to go take a hot shower of his own, they share a smirk, and then a kiss.


	7. Christmas Rager

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Laura (along with most of the town, clearly) is invited to a Christmas Rager.

Generally, Laura and Carmilla are a couple of opposites. When one of them is passionate about something, the other is relatively tepid on the subject, but to the point where they can still have basic conversations for the other’s benefit. This serves them well because they never run out of things to talk about and argue about, it edifies both of them, and it means that while they are in a committed relationship they are still very clearly two separate beings.

However, they are very much in agreement on two things. One, that they adore each other, and they intend for that to last forever. Two, that large parties make them sort of nervous.

For Laura, it’s easy to see why. Her friends, in high school, had not really been about big parties, and she had spent a lot more nights curled under her blanket watching some sort of sci-fi or mystery media than she had doing something that could be considered teenage rebellion. She’d barely ever touched alcohol before college, just the occasional sips of wine that her father gave her at holiday dinners. And while she enjoys dancing, she’s not very good at the whole grinding-writhing thing that parties seem to have going on. Mostly because she doesn’t have enough courage to ask somebody to do something like that with her.

For Carmilla, it’s a little more complicated. Of course, it’s not a case of simple abstention for her, seeing as parties where a lot of people are drunk and it’s dark are very good places to snatch girls at her mother’s bidding. So all the parties that she’d gone to prior to the death of her mother weren’t exactly attended autonomously. She’d gone to precisely one party since the end of all that, a Zetas party, and it was honestly only to give Kirsch a couple of books that he’d asked for, her delivery decision timed poorly. Maybe it would have been better if Laura had been with her, but it left a bad taste in her mouth, left her skin feeling like bugs were crawling on it. Not even the several shots of spiced rum she downed got it out, even though she usually liked rum.

So the two of them are not so into parties, which is why they’re hesitant when Laura, after breakfast and a hate-watching of New Moon, gets a Facebook invite to a “Christmas Rager,” put on by someone from her old high school that she had never really known very well. “We don’t have to go,” Carmilla says helpfully, resting her chin on her girlfriend’s shoulder and reading the description of the event, which involves a lot of emojis and misspelled words, though the gist is clear. A house party to end all house parties, open bar, a DJ, dancing, UV and strobe lights.

“We don’t have to go,” Laura says thoughtfully, but she’s feeling kind of daring, and Carmilla’s arms are wrapped securely around her waist, making her feel safe and present. “But I think it might be kind of fun. I mean, going with you.”

Carmilla turns her head, looking at Laura, incredulous, with a laugh in her mouth when she speaks. “You’re serious?” she asks. “Because Hollis, by God I will take you to a Christmas Rager if that’s what your heart desires.”

Laura nods, like she’s making the decision to take on some incredible challenge, her jaw set. “Let’s go, then,” she says.

It’s easy for Carmilla to find party clothes--she has an affinity for the daring anyway in terms of her fashion choices, and she has a black body-con skirt and an impossibly tight leather tank that laces up in the back, a literal corset, one that she’s kept and modified from the time when corsets were actually a thing she wore on the daily, actually. Laura, though, is clueless. Eventually, Carmilla hijacks the whole process and picks Laura one of her own dresses, dark red, with a fitted bodice and a very short pleated skirt. Well, very short on Carmilla, with her long legs. On shorter Laura, it actually looks relatively modest.

Laura’s father is not aware of any of this--even though it’s the day after Christmas his work has sucked him back in, and he’s been in the office pretty much the entire day. Laura tells him that they’re going to go out to a party, and that they’ll be back late but not unmanageably so, and they’re going to take the bus, and yes, she’ll text him when she gets there and when she’s leaving and if she needs any help or a ride home. Then he goes back to his phone and she goes back to Carmilla, who’s putting on her makeup with a practiced hand.

“Do me,” she says, and the vampire looks up.

“Did plenty of that yesterday, cutie,” she comments, allowing sarcasm to creep into her voice even though her eyes are still fond.

“No, I mean, do my makeup,” Laura amends, sitting down on her bed a few feet from where Carmilla’s gone back to drawing on eyeliner, the wings bigger than usual, the shadow darker, more dramatic. She curls her eyelashes, applies mascara, and then turns to Laura.

Carmilla’s thinking that Laura looks beautiful even without a stitch of makeup on her face, but she’ll never say no to the chance to do a little painting with her favorite medium. Ten minutes later, Laura has a pretty killer smoky eye and creme liner, blush on her cheekbones, and though Carmilla thinks she looks gorgeous any way, she has to admit that Laura’s eyes, one of her favorite parts of the girl, take to makeup very well.

The Facebook event says that the party starts at nine, and sweet naive Laura has all intentions of showing up exactly at nine, but Carmilla dissuades her from that, knowing that the party won’t really be in full swing until at least ten, probably ten-thirty. They spend the time watching YouTube videos on Laura’s phone, stuff that makes both of them laugh until they’re in danger of crying their mascara off, until eventually it’s time to catch their bus.

“Christmas Rager is not a hyperbolic name,” Carmilla remarks as they walk quickly to the house. It’s a big place, with a fence around it and an archway that presides over the cobblestone walk up to the front door. Laura’s shivering, and Carmilla has her arm around her to try and leach some of her protection against the cold into her girlfriend, but it hardly matters when they actually enter the house (passing a positive tangled of lights, flashing, an inflatable snowman turned over onto its side, someone smoking what smells like marijuana with their foot on its head like a conquest). Inside, it’s sweltering, and Laura relaxes, or at least she does from the coldness she’d been feeling.

“Wow,” she says, and Carmilla hears her with her finely honed ears, but when Carmilla responds “Wow is a good description,” she has to lean down and practically yell it into Laura’s ear. The DJ is playing house music, but it’s all Christmas house music, old-timey vocals and orchestral scores combined with screeching, wailing drops and low, dirty beats.

They search out the kitchen first, clinging tightly to each other so as not to get lost in the crowd. It’s a little quieter in here, but not much, people pouring their own drinks into plastic cups. Hot chocolate is simmering on the stove, with Irish Creme and Fireball next to the pot, clearly encouraging people to spike their cocoa. Carmilla goes there and does so, her own made strong with Fireball--like Mexican hot chocolate, but more alcoholic.

“I don’t even know what any of this is,” admits Laura, who’s looking around, feeling like she’s entered a different dimension.

“You’ll like Irish Creme,” Carmilla assures her. “It’s sweet, has less of a kick than this stuff.” And she pours a cup for Laura, generous but not overkill with the liquor, swirling it in her hand to stir it before handing it over. “Drink up, and then maybe we’ll pay a visit to the dance floor.”

Laura tentatively tries it, and finds that she likes it--it’s got a heavier taste than regular hot chocolate, a little kick to it that she knows is the alcohol but that isn’t even all that noticeable. So she’s taking big sips. Though when she samples the barest amount of Carmilla’s cup, she almost gags at the burn it starts up in her mouth.

The vampire laughs, and drains the cup, pouring a shot of straight Fireball and downing that too. “Don’t try to match me,” she warns. “First of all, you’re smaller than I am, and second of all, vampiric constitution makes it a pretty impressive feat to get drunk.”

Laura nods, though she’s drunk all of her own cup as well. She doesn’t refill it, though, becoming aware of a lightheadedness that feels good, makes her laugh as she watches Carmilla fill nearly half of her cup with the cinnamon whisky and then tosses it back without even trying.

“What the fuck, yo, this girl goes hardcore,” some guy is saying, looking at Carmilla, and then his eyes pass over to Laura and there’s a spark of recognition.

“Hey!” he shouts, stumbling over to her, putting one hand on each of her shoulders and looking in her eyes, a stupid, inebriated grin on his face. “I know you. Laura, right? We went to high school together.”

Oh, yes. Now she remembers. He’d been in her biology class junior year. “Yeah, we did!” she responds, loudly. “It’s good to see you again!” (Not true, but the thing to say.) “I’m back in town for winter break.”

“That’s so cool! Hey, do you wanna dance?”

Laura can’t even interpret the question for a second, and then she realizes what he’s asking, and she raises her eyebrows, quirking one side of her mouth and looking over at Carmilla, who takes it as her cue to slide up behind Laura, putting an arm around her waist.

“Actually, she’s taken,” she says, smoothly, and coaxes Laura’s head to the side for a kiss. It’s amusing, heteronormativity, watching the guy put all the pieces together, and then slinking off, evidently too confused to produce a response. “Let’s dance,” Carmilla says, and Laura nods.

They fight their way to the thick of it, the music loud, communication impossible except with their bodies. Carmilla is exemplary at all of the technique-driven dances throughout the ages, the waltz, the sarabande, the salsa, even some tap and ballet at one time in her life. But she’s also figured out the secret to this type of dancing, this modern idiot’s version of movement. Just pretend like you’re having sex with clothes still on.

So she pulls Laura back-to-front like other pairs are doing, holding her at the waist, kissing her neck and letting her hips gyrate into her, swaying and swiveling on the spot. Laura doesn’t get it at first, but moves back against her tentatively at first, and then with more confidence when she realizes that it’s the right thing.

If either of them had been paying any attention to anything except each other, they might have noticed that with the easiness of their movements, their clear comfort with each other’s bodies, was attracting a bit of attention, especially from people that recognized Laura from high school, not by name, just by face. “Who’s that Goth girl that Hollis was grinding on?” someone asks someone outside before putting out a cigarette against the brick wall of the house.

That Hollis isn’t concerned. Carmilla’s grip on her is tight, her slow movements sexy, her lips on Laura’s neck warm and hungry. No teeth. Wouldn’t do to try to bite while dancing, and besides, she wants this night to be all pleasure, no pain for Laura.

The party moves forward in a series of weird flashes. Carmilla could probably sit down and reconstruct the timeline if she’d been asked to, but in her casual memories it just appears as a set of tableaus--Laura turning herself around and clinging to her body, her arms around her neck, hot lips on hers, while a particularly dirty rendition of Carol of the Bells sets the mood. Waiting in line for the bathroom, seeing people flash and stumble by. Someone pulling out peppermint schnapps and chocolate syrup, offering peppermint patty shots to anyone who wanted to sit in the chair in front of them and open their mouth. Carmilla _doing_ a couple of them, then Laura doing a couple, half to try it and half to match Carmilla in just this one thing. It’s not their traditional way of having fun, but it’s new and exciting and lascivious.

When they finally leave the Christmas Rager together, when everything is starting to wind down, they exit through the front door and head down the walkway to where the arch will transport them back onto the sidewalk. Carmilla calls a cab from the front porch, and they’re leaning in the archway waiting for it when Laura looks up and laughs.

“What is it?”

She points upwards. “Someone hung mistletoe.”

And so they had. It’s not a particularly attractive bunch of mistletoe, but it’s there, clearly recognizable, and with several Durex condoms shoved into it. Not particularly romantic.

Carmilla grins. “You know what I’m going to do right now,” she says, as she steps forward, closer to where Laura’s leaning against the opposite side of the archway. “You know where this is going.”

Laura’s tipsy mind is buzzing pleasantly, and her lips are turned up in a smile. “You’ll just have to show me,” she says, but she doesn’t get all the way through the sentence because Carmilla’s pressing her against the wrought iron and kissing her, rolling her tongue into her mouth, holding her tight around the waist.

They only break apart when there’s a loud honk from the road, the cab driver announcing his arrival.


	8. Soup Kitchen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another Hollis family tradition: volunteering.

Carmilla is becoming more and more convinced that Laura isn’t actually a normal human. What with the alcohol and the late night after the party, she had expected to wake up around noon with the girl still tucked into her arms, but instead she wakes up alone, with the sunlight streaming through the gap in Laura’s curtains and the smell of baking things, something that often wafts through the halls of their dorm at Silas what with Perry around, in the air. She struggles her way out of the tangled duvet, goes to brush her teeth, then saunters downstairs wrapped in one of Laura’s throw blankets, this one with the pattern of the TARDIS on it.

Laura and her father are in the kitchen. The baking smell only hits Carmilla stronger when she actually enters the room, and suddenly she’s craving both blood and sugar simultaneously. The solution, of course, is to wait until Laura consumes her usual amounts of sugar, and then drink from her.

Laura, for her part, has already eaten and has been in the kitchen for almost two and a half hours. This whole affair has almost slipped her mind--she’d meant to tell Carmilla about it the night before, but then they’d been distracted by the bacchanalia that was the Christmas Rager, which she’d woken up from with a mild headache. Two aspirin dispersed that straightaway, though, and now she’s down in the kitchen performing one of their usual post-Christmas rituals--the holiday cookie baking, and the accompanying volunteering. When she had still been in high school, she and her father had often gone to the soup kitchen in town to serve meals and bring socks and warm coats to the homeless and impoverished population in and around the cluster of towns. They had always gone around Christmas with a special treat for the masses, though--trays and trays of holiday cookies that Bruce baked and Laura frosted.

When Carmilla is informed of this tradition, she thinks that she may actually have not only an inhuman girlfriend, but also a saintly one. Poor Laura’s fingers are clearly hurting already from the tubes of frosting that she’s manipulating, doing basic decorations on little Christmas trees and gingerbread people and stars that Bruce is cutting out from rolled-out dough. It’s less about the appeal of the task, and more about relieving her from it, that makes Carmilla gently lift the tube of green frosting out of her hands and kiss her on the forehead.

“I want to help,” she says. “I’ll frost, you do the sprinkles on top.”

Laura is silently grateful. It’s a pain that she’s willing to suffer through, but a pain nonetheless. And Carmilla, with her skill at drawing, is doing a much more precise job than she had, anyway, drawing neat lines and stripes and artful swirls with a practiced hand. “Sure you weren’t actually a pastry chef at some point in your centuries of life?” she teases her, when Bruce has stepped out to use the bathroom or something.

“I may have seduced a baker’s daughter or two,” Carmilla admits, with one of her little grins directed at Laura, mischief in her eyes. “They taught me a few things.”

In any case, Carmilla’s newfound frosting skills and the addition of an extra set of hands pay off--it takes them less time than usual to finish the two hundred and fifty cookies that they churn out, with Bruce mixing the dough and rolling it out, Carmilla frosting, and Laura running back and forth, putting the cut-out shapes on trays and putting them in the oven, taking them out and bringing them to Carm and then putting sprinkles on her finished frosted baked goods. It’s an assembly line that maybe isn’t the most efficient, but is certainly the most fun--all through the escapade, they’re talking, joking. Carmilla tells a story about one of her philosophy professors that Bruce gets a kick out of, and then Bruce starts telling embarrassing stories about Laura as a child, which has Laura herself indignant and Carmilla delighted.

“You know that after a bath, she used to streak around the house, with her towel streaming behind her like a cape, shouting _I’m Captain Naked-Pants!”_

Laura makes a noise of upset, but Carmilla’s laughing so hard she accidentally smears the star she’s frosting. “You should start doing that after showers in the dorm room,” she suggests, and Bruce laughs, while Laura’s simultaneously trying not to laugh and reaching over to whap Carmilla on the upper arm at her cheek.

All in all, it’s a pretty relaxing pursuit, one that makes the time fly, and though Carmilla had woken up late she’s surprised when she looks up at the clock and it’s almost five. Their volunteer shift starts at six-thirty, and if they want to get there with cookies, they’re going to have to stop making new ones and start boxing up the ones they have. Laura offers to cook dinner on her own, so that the task can be done more efficiently with her father and Carmilla working together. So after another half an hour, Laura has spaghetti and a salad on the table, and all of the cookies are in Tupperware containers for easy transport, a whole, obscenely large stack of them on the counter, some balancing precariously.

Carmilla has never really volunteered before. There hasn’t been much point--she’s always been on the run, traveling, not in one place long enough to build the kind of relationship with anywhere that takes volunteer work. Besides, her mother with all of her supremacy notions and the idea that mere humans were leagues below them hadn’t been all that interested in helping the peons with their mundane little needs. She paid little mind to places like food banks and soup kitchens, except to snatch people who wouldn’t be missed for the sacrifice, which had always left a disgusting taste in Carmilla’s mouth, even when she had been mildly convinced that she was doing the right thing by helping her mother.

So it’s a new experience for her. Laura, on the other hand, has set foot in this place so many times that half of the regular visitors to the kitchen know her name and where she’s at school--her father still goes by himself even when she’s at Silas. She leads the way into the kitchen, her arms full of the Tupperware containers, as are Bruce’s and Carmilla’s, managing the heroic feat of getting all of the cookies in one trip. The manager of the place, whose name is Monty and has a warm smile and neat dreadlocks, whistles when they descend with their haul.

“The Hollis family always outdoes themselves,” he says, shaking his head and then extending his hand to Carmilla. “Just follow their lead. You will need a hair net, though.”

“A hair net,” Carmilla says dubiously. She is beginning to rethink this whole volunteering thing if this is what is required of her. But before she can say anything further, Laura is jamming one of the aforementioned things over the ponytail on top of her head, laughing and snapping a picture with her new phone before Carmilla has a chance to complain.

“I am so putting this on Twitter,” she says, turning the phone around for Carmilla to see her own murderous expression. “Look how cute you look.”

The “cute” vampire, however, is already being directed by Monty to chop vegetables, which she does with a sort of sedulous concentration, the dull knife that he’d given her descending again and again to make even slices of carrots, celery, tomatoes, potatoes, and green beans. Laura spreads all of the cookies out back onto trays so that they can ration them out for their shift, and when that’s done she joins Carmilla by the stove, taking the vegetables that she chops and putting them in the large pots of stew on the burners, stirring all of them with ladles and using tasting spoons to check the balance of spices. Bruce is on serving duty at first.

Eventually, they rotate, Laura and Carmilla standing at the counter ladling out generous portions of stew, putting pieces of bread on top and setting a Christmas cookie next to the bowl. Carmilla doesn’t do a lot of talking--this kind of humanity is something that she’s never really had to encounter. Her family when she had been a human had been rich, and vampires, by sheer longevity, didn’t have to worry about money, pinching pennies or making budgets. She supposes that she had sort of believed the depictions of the impoverished in terrible movies, but this is a lesson in humanity for her.

Because even when it’s obvious that people are down on their luck, when they have cheeks that are half-frostbitten and gloves on their children that aren’t nearly warm enough to get them through the still-snowy, bitterly cold weather...even then, they’re smiling when Laura puts a ladle full of stew in their bowl and greets them with a smile of her own. They’re saying “welcome back, we’ve missed seeing you around here, how’s school going, how are your grades, oh this is your girlfriend, she’s so beautiful, does she go to school with you?” Of course, people don’t like that they have to do this, that they have to come here to get a nutritious meal, but humanity, Carmilla has been noticing recently, always finds a way to pull through with a smile. It’s a quality that she thinks she may have to internalize, with her liberty, her newfound connection with humanity in the form of this beautiful, beautiful human girl who’s standing next to her with her hair up in a hairnet that _should not look that good on anyone, honestly_ and talking to absolutely everyone.

“I hope you’re not hating it here,” Laura says, halfway through their shift, when they’ve been ladling and slicing bread and passing out cookies for nearly two hours. It’s actually a legitimate concern--she knows that Carmilla is genuinely good, but she’s had so much time to be cynical, to regard places like this as a bandage over a gaping wound. And there’s definitely the added dimension of the continued fear that Carmilla will regard the Hollis family’s quaint holiday traditions as just that--quaint, trifling, almost stupid.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” comes the reply, almost immediately. “I love it here.”

The next woman to come into the line grins at Laura in a way that makes it obvious that she remembers her. “You look so grown-up,” she says, reaching over the counter to thumb at Laura’s chin. The girl beams.

“You look awesome, Rita,” she says in return, thankful that she remembers the woman’s name. “Dad told me that you had gotten an apartment? That still going okay?”

“Sure, sure, it’s a hole in the wall, but it’s better than not having any walls at all. Still pretty hard to make ends meet, but we’re scraping by. Who is this?”

Laura introduces Carmilla her girlfriend for probably the thirtieth time last night, and Rita smiles at both of them, picking up the Styrofoam cup of hot coffee that she’d poured for herself at the open dispenser in the corner and raising it like a glass of champagne in a toast. “Here’s to the future Mrs. Hollis!” she says, in a coarse and joyful voice, and back from the stove, Carmilla hears Bruce shout “Not yet, Rita! For God’s sake, not yet!”

And then they’re all laughing, Carmilla and Laura and Bruce and Rita, happiness the only emotion hanging in the air, rowdy festivity at every table. It warms Carmilla’s heart like Laura does. She thinks that she would very much like to come back here.

And not to mention that night, when they’re in bed together, Laura’s wet hair spread over her pillows while Carmilla’s on top of her, kissing her and tasting the mint of her toothpaste, along with the aftertaste of the blood that Laura had offered up to he, knowing that the overabundance of human sustenance that the day isn’t enough for her. They’re trying to be quiet, because Bruce is probably still awake. Still, Laura whispers between their lips.

“The future Mrs. Hollis,” she murmurs. “I kinda like the sound of that.”


End file.
